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by coldcode 2016 days ago
Paying for dead cobras always pays off.

Also ticket != value. Lots of tickets for things that involve almost no work and things that actually make a difference to the customer/product are not equal.

Everything I work on is new products/projects and tickets come in all sizes and shapes, and often change daily as some exec crams in more new ideas or some designer or product person "clarifies" the ticket, even after the work is done. Tickets are often written and estimated long before decisions are actually made. Defects are written that require a lot of investigation only to discover it's some other teams problem and you can't do anything or turns out to be a temporary service outage no one communicated or misconfiguration in some CMS or even plain simply not understanding what the product does.

Measuring productivity by tickets closed is a whole pile of dead snakes.
2 comments
jrs235 2016 days ago
In case people don't understand the dead cobras comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

It pertains to perverse incentives.

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TameAntelope 2016 days ago
What do you think of the idea that if tickets aren't doing a good job of representing value to the customer in some form (even if it's second or third order value), those tickets are poorly written and it's a "garbage in/garbage out" situation?

It's not really a helpful observation, but I'm curious if there's a way for the relationship between "people asking for things" and "people building things" to be repeatably fruitful (IMO it's very possible that reliably producing customer value is either insanely hard and/or not doable consistently).

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coldcode 2016 days ago
Some things are incredibly important but not directly related to the customer; like services called by service called by services called by clients. It's not always easy to connect the dots especially in a micro service world. But without the ultimate service the customer can't do anything.

Making good tickets across a dozen organizations and 100's of people is hard to ever get right. Which is why counting tickets is sort of pointless, you might have a ticket to add a single value to a database and without it, the whole product doesn't work, but you have no idea since there are 10 layers between you and the real customer.

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